This Realm Has Forgotten Its Name

Shen Zhijiu made his living collecting junk.

Broken bowls, rotten wood, chipped stone tablets: he took anything others didn't want. He had a secret: he could see the "old names" of things the world had forgotten. Speak a broken bowl's old name, and it could turn back into a fragment of the stone that repaired the sky. Speak the old name of a rotten branch, and it could reach the heavens for a moment.

The price was that each time he spoke an old name, he forgot a piece of his own past.

He forgot his mother's face. He forgot his father's name. He even forgot where he'd hidden the pocket money he'd saved for three years.

People vanished every day at the Nameless Ferry. The Immortal Alliance said this was the "Way of Forgetting Emotions," where the more you forgot, the faster you cultivated. Shen Zhijiu didn't see it that way. He found a broken bowl that had escaped from the Zero Furnace. Five words were engraved on its base: "Number Zero, three left on the countdown."

A junk collector began picking up the names the whole world had deleted.

The Immortal Alliance hunted him, the Name-Erasing Tower put him on its wanted list, and the neighboring sect tried to poach him with a load of spirit-beast meat. All Shen Zhijiu wanted was to open an Old Name Repair Shop and mend people's old love letters, old recipes, and old chamber pots.

But the countdown to the Heavenly Dao's system reset hung over his head. The whole world was forgetting, and someone had to remember.

"If you forget, just remember it again. What's the big deal?"